


Dying of the Light

by ShastaFirecracker



Category: The Authority
Genre: Apocalypse, M/M, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 05:36:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3108056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShastaFirecracker/pseuds/ShastaFirecracker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Smog covers up the sun and Apollo collapses. Midnighter sends him away to heal. They lose each other. (A missing-scene story set between the day of the apocalypse and the point at which World's End #1 begins, months later.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dying of the Light

**Author's Note:**

> I've tried to keep the flashback events of "Authority: World's End #10" intact while expanding on the events that must have occurred immediately after the apocalypse, and then how the characters got from that rock-bottom low to where they are in World's End #1 (i.e. somewhat organized, powers returning in fits and spurts, fairly well-equipped all things considered, and already a few months into the end of the world.)

Dying of the Light

 

It's 47 hours, 23 minutes after the end of the world when Apollo collapses.

It's only him, Midnighter and Swift now. They've been taking turns carrying Angie's prone body from location to location as each one proves less stable than they'd hoped. The Carrier is still groaning, shifting realities with a resistant London. Both are in agony. Footing is unsure everywhere; what isn't twisted yet soon will be. They'd all flown off looking for Jenny, and when they'd returned, defeated, to Command, Angie had been lying on a sloping floor with one foot already dangling over a half-mile drop that hadn't been there ten minutes ago. Her fall had only been stopped by the broken remains of the couch they'd left her on.

They haven't dared to leave her alone since. The last of her silver skin has sloughed away, and they've wrapped her in a blanket found in passing. She is defenseless; she looks strange clothed in nothing but soft olive skin. Barely recognizable.

Swift insists, in her frantic and half-distracted way, that she can still feel Angie's heartbeat in the trembling pathways of the air, but even Midnighter can't find a real pulse. He puts Swift's insistence down to a spiritual thing and shares the burden of Angie's body, taking her when Swift needs to fly up to scout or when Apollo needs his hands free.

They haven't been able to move Jack. He went down before the EMPs; before the crash. He went mad with London's abrupt and petrifying fear; he tried to brace himself, tried to brace the city, but she wouldn't listen. The shadow of the Carrier grew over her, eclipsing the sun.

Now, he burns where she burns. He breaks where she breaks. He manages to tell them in broken sobs that he saw the Doctor jump. The Earth is in just as much pain as the cities, if not more, and the Doctor can feel it. He's gone.

They leave Jack half-merged with the mangle where ship and city meet, and he crunches and shifts as the two sink further into each other. They can't get him out. London won't let him go; she clings with the bonecrushing grip of a terrified child unable to escape from a brutal bludgeoning. He'll be with her until she dies, or until he can regain enough of his faculties to loosen her grip. He hasn't stopped screaming.

Apollo is the first to carry Angie. She drapes over his shoulders in a fireman's carry with all the weight of a silk shawl, and if he bends forward at all, it is only to keep her from falling off.

After one day, amidst the unceasing and always-immediate chaos, Midnighter begins to notice that Apollo puts Angie down more often. That his hands tremble when they're pushing cars out of the way. That, once, just before lifting the London Bridge off of an abattoir of stunned civilians, he stops and closes his eyes and wipes an angry hand across his forehead. And, afterwards, his halo looks dimmer than it should after such relatively minor effort.

Midnighter means to confront him about it, but he never gets a chance. The sky has been black and starless since the crash. Smoke and toxic fumes pump into the air from the open wound in the world like blood into water. Sharks come sniffing to the arterial bleed, expecting a feast. They get the Authority instead – what remains of it.

Midnighter is too busy to talk to his husband. He's already sick with worry over his missing daughter. Jenny could, if not fix all of this in a blink, at least ease it. Changing reality is her gig. She's swallowed _supernovas,_ for fuck's sake. Her conspicuous absence has Midnighter's brain shrieking scenarios at a three deaths per nanosecond. The millions of visions of his baby girl ripped to shreds blur into one, sickeningly overwhelming probability.

They're on the Strand, fighting to hold back another cancerous welling-up of a reality not their own until the city can shift again, close this crack even as it opens another. Behind Midnighter, Apollo takes a breath, coughs once. Midnighter smears something that looks like a pandimensional hookworm across the warped pavement, realizes it's the last one. He snaps his head around when Apollo coughs again, because Apollo doesn't _cough._

It's been 47 hours and 23 minutes since the beginning of the end.

Swift is high above, cradling Angie's body away from the danger. She stoops into a dive when Midnighter yells. He's too far away and not fast enough to catch Apollo before he hits the ground, face to the asphalt, one arm twisted awkwardly beneath him. Midnighter drops to his knees and turns Apollo over, enhanced senses taking in Apollo's erratic vitals. Apollo's hair is lank and grayish in this graveyard light. It veins across his forehead and cheek, stuck down by cold sweat and a spattering of gore.

Apollo's gasping for breath. Charge low, photosynthesis compromised; he's reverted to baseline human, struggling to suck in oxygen that just isn't there. Midnighter's had an anvil of a headache for the last 24 hours, too. It's the smog. Midnighter's been processing it. Bad air's never been a problem for him. Swift's a creature of the air, probably has asbestos lungs. But Apollo can't separate out the toxins, not when he's in the red like this.

And the smog's cutting off the sun.

Swift lands and puts Angie down and hurries over to the two men. Midnighter's already processed what needs to happen next. Visions of Apollo dead and dying flicker past on a broken movie reel behind his eyes. They alternate. Jenny. Apollo. Jenny. Apollo. The fear's transcended to something cold and massive, rising up to drown out the constant ticker tape of statistics.

He puts his gloved hands to Apollo's face, brushes away the stray hair. Apollo grimaces, evening and deepening his breaths by sheer stubborn willpower, and Midnighter can see fear coupled with understanding in his husband's eyes. His body feels like it's withering away under Midnighter's hands. God, it's all happening so _fast._

At least there's no need to waste time explaining, complaining, saying goodbye. Midnighter lifts Apollo to him, chest to chest, and holds him tight. Apollo drags his arms up, manages to hug Midnighter back. He's so weak, already so weak.

“Midnighter,” comes Swift's voice, strangely soft, distant.

Midnighter lets go and stands, pulling Apollo up with him. Apollo drops his head against Midnighter's, forehead bumping mask; Midnighter turns and kisses Apollo fiercely, holding the back of his head in one hand, knowing this is going to hurt like unanesthetized open-heart surgery later, only worse.

“Love you,” Apollo rasps out.

Much worse.

“Take him as high as you can,” Midnighter tells Swift, who nods and takes Apollo gently from Midnighter's arms. “Love you, too, bastard,” he adds to Apollo, grasping his hand one last time. Apollo grins weakly and leans on Swift. When they let go of each other, it's mostly because Swift pulls Apollo away.

She hooks her arms under Apollo's. Midnighter steps back as she snaps open her full wingspan, sending eddying currents of toxic smog everywhere. It's a slow takeoff, being from a standing start and with a heavy passenger, but she gains speed quickly above the shifting level of the rooftops. Midnighter watches until he can't see them anymore.

Then he walks over to Angie, picks her up and starts looking for somewhere safer than here.

\---

Angie wakes two days later, human and cold. They walk into the Primark on Oxford Street, which is miraculously whole, and she finds the least ruined clothes that fit her. She scratches her hand on a broken pipe while they're running from a thousand-eyed hydra-thing filling Covent Garden that Swift and Midnighter don't have the power between them to fight. Angie's scratch bleeds silver. They lose her for hours, then: her mind gone, empty-eyed, trying to talk to her nanites. Midnighter carries her again.

They hole up, exhausted and weak with shock, in the basement of a bookstore off Leicester Square. Midnighter snaps a chemical light stick because they don't want to be in the dark, and because he needs to be able to see Swift's left wing so he can pull a handful of shrapnel out of it. She sits and cries quietly and doesn't flinch when Midnighter pulls jagged glass from the junction of her wing and shoulder.

Angie returns to them broken and lost. She lays on the floor and stares at the dimming light stick, her face awash with sick green.

“Angie,” sighs Swift, who hasn't moved since she sat down. She's slumped forward over her knees, her arms dragging the ground beside her, clawless, while her wings tremble and twitch infrequently, then lie as still as dead things. She turns her head against her knees to look at Angie, whose back is to the foot of a bookcase.

“They're not dead,” Angie says distantly, studying the fingernails of the hand stretched out in front of her. One finger twitches. She frowns like she can't remember who she is, why she's talking. “They're not dead, or I'd be dead.”

“Thank God,” murmurs Swift.

“It's worse,” says Angie. “They're dumb. Deaf and dumb. A life-support system.”

“Blood,” mutters Midnighter, who is invisible in the dark except for a thin sickle-moon of green reflecting off his emblem.

Angie's face twists up, but she doesn't cry. She's human again. If pricked, she will bleed.

\---

Midnighter doesn't need to sleep, really, but he likes to. The only times he doesn't are when needs must, or when he's restless without his better half. This night qualifies on both counts. Swift said she left him in the thinnest smog, on one of the highest peaks of the Carrier. She couldn't stay with him at that altitude. Less smog also meant less air. Midnighter's been balancing and re-balancing the rate of solar absorption against the rate of suffocation for going on eleven hours. Different variables bring different results. He knows one or the other will have won out by now.

There is a 36.8% chance that Apollo is dead. Midnighter can think of nothing else.

His computer is on the alert, but there's hardly a point in trying to predict what might be the next thing to leap out of the chaos and attack them. When it does, he'll know how to take it out. What really galls Midnighter is that innocent people are dying while they hide and sleep. But he wouldn't be much good on his own out there, and Swift and Angie need the rest. They're two thirds of all the world's got right now. If he leaves and they die in a freak reality shift, he'll be the entire front line between this world and... all the others.

He thinks, _What if I have to do this alone?_

Apollo lying up on that spire, cold. Apollo's never cold. Strong wind shear that high up. He could be blown off the edge. He could fall, unable to fly.

Midnighter closes his eyes, listens to Swift and Angie breathing in the dark.

He still sees the white-gold speck falling, flaring once and guttering out like a candle flame in a high wind. He'll never be able to believe it hasn't happened until he sees Apollo for himself. Schrodinger's superhero.

By the time he finally convinces himself not to worry himself sick over Apollo, his mind cycles around to Jenny again.

The long night creeps inexorably on.

\---

It's clear that the reality shifts are slowing. Other dangers are arising, threats sucked through from other universes that have already been cut off from their doorways home. The situation reverses: travel is now more dangerous than staying still. They make their bedraggled way back to the Carrier.

Jack has dragged himself free from London, but for a full eighth of a second even Midnighter doesn't recognize him. He is lying on the floor of what might once have been the Junction Room, a stick figure wrapped in black and white rags. Half his face is missing. His feet are charred and melted, as if he's walked across hot lava.

On seeing him, Swift shrieks, raptor-pitched, and leaps into the air. The ceiling is gone and she's high above and contorting with the viciousness of her anger and grief before they even realize she's taken off. She's been keeping her emotions on a very short leash, looking to the sky almost as often as Midnighter does. And now Jack, ruined... the leash breaks. She's blindsided.

Angie walks slowly to Jack and kneels beside him. Midnighter picks up on his vitals from a distance, steady but weak. He looks dead, but he isn't. Angie puts her hand against his shoulder as if she isn't sure he's real.

Midnighter sees himself and Apollo in their places, something profound passing between two broken people, and he suddenly wants to scream and tear the world apart with his bare hands. He wants to rip down the sky until Apollo comes down with it. He wants, and he is less than whole, and he doesn't know what's happened to Apollo or Jenny, and there is _nothing_ he can do, and it _hurts. so. much._

Instead he squeezes his eyes shut, because this isn't the time to break down. He walks over to Jack and Angie. He wishes he could leave them alone to this moment, their personal assessments of the damage between them, but he can't. It isn't safe here.

Jack's staring left eye is bared by missing flesh, but now his right eyelid has cracked open, too, so they know he's really awake. His charred stubs of fingers seek out Angie's. She grips his hand too tight, and he sighs out a low moan that might be pain or might just be an attempt to speak.

“I'm here,” Angie is saying, over and over. “I'm here.”

Jack makes croaking sounds and Angie quiets. Jack rolls his eyes ponderously back, then down again, focuses in on Angie's knee. “She's dead,” he says at last. “They're dead. London... Carrier.”

Angie leans over him and lets out a low keening sob that is almost inhuman in its grief. If Angie's tech had been working, she'd have known already. To need to have Jack tell her hurt almost as much as the news itself.

\---

When Swift returns, still burning with newly-restrained grief, she helps Angie rig together a stretcher for Jack while Midnighter goes on a salvage hunt for better equipment. They have to be careful with the fragile shell of their teammate. He can live without cities, at something approaching baseline human, but it's a slim existence at best. There's plenty of pollution for him to process into energy, but he'll need constant fluids. And the trauma to London on his watch was too great, too sudden. It isn't like it was with D.C. Jack had been hurt when the mushroom cloud went up over the White House, but he'd only needed to Door into another metropolis to recover.

All the cities are burning now, he says. There's nowhere to go. And he'd been fused with London while she died of blunt force trauma: he can't disentangle their energies after that, and London's wounds have turned septic. He's shackled to a dead city that is infecting him and no one knows how to cut him free.

The medical bay is mostly crushed, the rest flooded. It was near the bottom of the ship and it's gotten disastrously intimate with the Thames over the last four days. Luckily, a lot of the supplies were hermetically sealed for sterilization, and the water has only destroyed the linens. The EMPs ensure that the water is not electrified. Midnighter takes off his coat and mask and stuffs a handful of light sticks in his belt. He looks into the flat brown water until he's sure he knows how to handle anything he might find beneath the surface, takes a deep breath and dives.

It's a tedious process, repeatedly picking a likely spot, dropping a light stick and then hunting around it for the eight minutes he gets before he needs to breathe again. The water is almost opaque with scraped-up riverbed silt and he has to duck around a lot of wrecked boats and dead bodies. After three hours he's run out of light sticks and he's brought up a small fortune in sealed bottles of medicine, syringes, scalpels and IV sets packed in plastic crates, sealed first aid kits and three wheelchairs.

He picks up as much as he can carry at once and hikes back to the Junction Room. Swift, Angie and Jack are gone. The chance of their radiotelepathy working is laughable, but he asks anyway: _Angie? Where are you?_

He's just talking to himself in his head. He sighs and follows the scent trail of charred Jack instead.

They've found a relatively undamaged set of personal quarters two levels up. Not a room that had ever belonged to any of them, but dozens of refugee families have probably lived in it since the Carrier grew it, and that seems appropriate now. Several beds had fallen against one wall, and the women have turned one of them right-side-up again. Jack barely makes a bump under the blanket they've draped over him. He seems to be asleep, his left hand curled against his chest and immovable. The missing half of his face, the hand, the way his left leg won't straighten: it's as if he's had a stroke and his left half is paralyzed.

Angie reluctantly gets up from where she sits at Jack's bedside and follows Midnighter back down to the med bay. Swift stays behind, one eye on Jack, one eye on the tall window that shows the roiling sky. It takes three more trips to get everything Midnighter salvaged, but each trip seems to hearten Angie a little more. She looks at the equipment and the old Engineer cogs crank into life behind her eyes.

“Clockwork,” she says later, as all three of them sit around cleaning the scum of river muck off the salvaged supplies and checking to make sure they're all still sealed. The loudest sounds in the room are Jack's shallow breathing and the drip of his new saline/morphine cocktail.

Swift quirks an eyebrow. Midnighter, mask and coat back in place, is inscrutable as ever. From time to time he glances at the window.

“We need to be able to communicate,” says Angie. Midnighter snorts in agreement. “I can make crank-power radios. We need to hit hardware stores, jewelers', get me something to work with. Batteries are the biggest priority. Handheld radios, wired for batteries, kinetic and solar. Tech isn't dead, it's just been knocked back to small-scale.”

“The magnetic poles have gone haywire,” says Swift. “Frequencies are going to be unstable. Even if you can build them, will they work over any kind of distance, for any length of time?”

“They'll have to,” Angie says grimly.

They work on in silence. Midnighter glances out the window every few minutes.

\---

Angie builds her radios. It takes three days.

Over the course of the next week they spread out again, a means of instant communication giving them enough of a sense of security that they can dare to stray out of each other's sight. Angie stays with Jack because he needs a caretaker. He's retreated into himself with the humiliation of his condition, never speaking, only glaring his one unprotected red eye at anyone who asks him how he's doing. Swift prefers to sleep outside. She's developing a massive following of confused birds.

Midnighter picks a room near the very top of the Carrier, in the thinnest smog, where one entire wall is a viewport. It's a blessing, maybe, that they can't get to the level where his and Apollo's quarters were. It seems intact from the outside, but internal damage is blocking all the passageways in or out of that sector. Midnighter doesn't need to see Jenny's old toys scattered around, the threadbare couch and dead TV, the dresser full of civvies in variations on a theme (white), their bed. Empty since they'd woken up on the morning of the day the world ended.

Midnighter pulls up the memory of that waking from the back catalogue of his memory, replays the security of curling into Apollo, ensconced in a well of heat, face somewhere around Apollo's clavicle, Apollo's arm draped heavily over his side. That's as far as he gets before he has to shut the memory down and store it, quick. His hands are already shaking.

Another week creeps past, and another. When he sleeps, he sleeps in the room he chose – but he could count the number of times he's slept on one hand. Most of the time up in his room is spent sitting in front of the viewport, a lukewarm beer near his hand, cleaning gore off his weapons or out of his costume. It's not like he can order a new one anymore. He's reconditioned himself to the habits of fastidiousness he and Apollo had let slide after their exile had ended. The outfit is patched already, but it's holding up better than he is.

He's descended into a robotic state of distracted denial. He knows the others have noticed, and they look at him with strained expressions of helplessness, but not with pity. There's nothing they can say to him. Swift avoids him with an air of shame, but he doesn't blame her. He should tell her that, but he can't bring himself to speak about it. If he says it out loud it'll become real. Schrodinger's superhero will be dead, not half-dead. The probability will reduce itself to zero.

He listens to Angie and to his computer. He goes where they aim him and does what they tell him to do. He killed a pack of hunting velociraptors last week. It'd be one for the books, but there are no more books. No world powers to notice and equally fear and appreciate their help. They're doing good to get a terrified nod of thanks from one out of every dozen civilians they rescue. The Carrier's relatively safe compared to the streets: it's more defensible, at least. They've started using it as a refugee camp again. Angie does most of the planning, the building, the helping, the talking. Swift scouts for pods of lost survivors. Midnighter goes out and gets them. Jack... persists.

And slowly but surely, it gets better. Angie gets a water-filtration system set up and she has a growing stockpile of batteries, food, medical supplies, wood and paper for the fires. Swift's training some of her birds to be messengers and dumb scouts. Jack can straighten his leg and close both of his eyes and he seems less sick, although no one knows enough about his physiology – including him – to say how well he's really doing.

Midnighter fights and scouts and salvages and raids from the time the others wake until they go to sleep again, and when he's the only one awake, he keeps doing the same.

A month after he let Swift take Apollo, he feels a tiny crack in the ice. He let himself fall asleep the night before because he was injured. He dreams about Apollo, and it's good, and warm, and safe, and Apollo says he's doing fine. He wakes strangling a sob into the pillow because some little part of him is already starting to let go of the pain.

He doesn't want to heal. He doesn't want to accept this.

\---

That afternoon, he's half a mile shy of the Carrier with three young women and twelve kids who had been hiding in the concrete basement of the Natural History Museum. They're a tour group from a French school who had been in the V&A when the impact happened. The women and three of the kids speak English, and one of the kids has been crying _Maman! Maman!_ all day. Midnighter doesn't need to speak French to know that tone of a child's voice.

He stomps squarely on a train of thought that is heading towards Jenny, in pain somewhere and crying for her dads.

He feels like a bit of thin skin stretched across a hot iron and left there to burn until the pain means nothing and what's left just dries out and shrivels up. There's no substance to his being anymore. He's had plenty of reasons to hate himself in the past, because mistakes made by a man who can see any outcome of a situation tend to be brutal, explosive mistakes, never made by halves. He owned all those mistakes, accepted the responsibility and the punishment for each one – but this apocalypse is a mistake of cosmic proportions. It's no one's fault, and with no burden to take on himself he feels as empty as the toxic air he breathes.

One of the young women shouts and points up. Midnighter raises his length of bloodied steel pipe to a high guard, but only a second's calculation tells him who's divebombing in his direction.

Swift nearly barrels through him, but he dodges and fends off the barrage of smaller birds that follow. The children scream, but Midnighter lowers his weapon and waves one hand at the three women: no danger, keep the kids calm. He turns to Swift, who is trembling in waves and gulping down air.

“I've found him,” she gasps, wings flapping agitatedly. She wants to take off again. She babbles, scanning the sky as she speaks. “Ifoundhimhe'sfinehesaidtotellyou –“

_“What?”_ Midnighter says, too loud, and the kids and their caretakers flinch. “You've – Li, slow down!”

She coughs for breath and shakes her head. “Sorry,” she says. “Sorry. I should have stayed with him, Midnighter, I'm _so sorry.”_ She looks on the verge of tears.

“He's okay,” says Midnighter, trying it out. It's like he's hearing his own voice for the first time. The factors of his Schrodinger's equation babble down to a solution. The world is cracking in half all over again. “He's okay? Li – you stupid, stupid –“ He grabs her, hugs her, and he is not a huggy person but she takes it in stride, squeezing back, her talons poking holes in the back of his coat. “I never blamed you, idiot. _Idiot.”_ The last is addressed at the world, himself, his wayward _but living_ husband. Midnighter is grinning, and the thrill of good news is infectious, so that even the refugees are smiling or laughing with relief.

“He said he tried to find us,” says Swift, pushing herself away from Midnighter but still holding his upper arms, “but the smog's fucked with his solar cells and he can't stay in it, it saps him. He can't come back down right now, but he's found somewhere low enough for us to come up. He's been salvaging, too – he found a hospital supply truck of oxygen tanks that ran off the M25 and maybe half of them are still good. He's bringing those to Angie now.”

Midnighter's still processing, both computer and core-brain racing so fast into the possible future that he can barely focus on the present. “I have to get these people back to the Carrier,” he says at last.

She nods, lets go of his arms. “Go. He said to tell you he'll be waiting.” She steps back, snaps open her wings and takes off.

Midnighter calls for the attention of the refugees and they set out again. There's fresh energy among the group as Midnighter's air of urgency passes on to the women and from them to the children.

The last half-mile takes them through the rotting trees of St. James Park, past the sinkhole of Downing Street, across the narrow strait that used to be Embankment via the fallen Needle – now a makeshift bridge. Midnighter doesn't like this route. There are too many places for enemies to set ambushes, too many corners around which he can't see, and the Needle has to be crossed in single file. Midnighter brings up the rear as the children cross, holding out their arms as if they're on a balance beam. He quickly circles around to the front once they've all reached the other side.

They're lucky today. Nothing's hiding in the water or the burned-out office buildings, or at least nothing hungry. He leads the way down the nearest Charing Cross subway entrance, down to where a Carrier corridor has fused with the Tube. The kids are more scared of climbing down onto train tracks than they were of anything else. “Mind the gap” is a lesson too deeply ingrained. Their teachers explain that no train will ever come down this track again, and there's nothing to worry about.

The third rail blends into an inset panel of the Carrier floor, and then they're in. Two blockades and twelve levels up, they're into the Carrier proper and running into other refugees. Midnighter leaves his charges with the elected community leader of level 16, sector 3. As he's turning to leave, one of the women bites her lip, runs up and hugs him quickly. He resists the instinct that tells him to put her in an armlock and snap her neck.

“Thank you,” she says fervently, looking up at his face, then drops her eyes because he's still spattered with blood from a fight this morning and he knows how scary he looks. The woman returns to her group and kids flood around her knees, reaching up for her hands. She kneels into the swell, assuring them that everything's going to be all right now.

Midnighter turns away, pulls out the radio he hasn't needed to use all day, clicks it on. “Angie, where are you?”

Angie's voice _skzzzzts_ to life and she says, “Midnighter! Li told you–“

“I know,” he says impatiently. “Where?”

“95/14. By the time you get there we should be set up.”

“On my way.” He clicks off the radio, primary heart pounding. There's a long climb ahead of him. He's never wished for a Door as much as he does right now.

\---

It takes him an hour to get to Level 95. He runs a lot of it, but even though it's barely over half of the Carrier's total vertical distance, that's sixteen miles in a straight line – and he has to take a lot of circuitous paths around wrecked halls and collapsed stairs.

Even inside the Carrier, the air thins the higher he gets. 95/14 is the base of one of the Carrier's tallest spires; it's six levels above the quarters he chose for himself. It's cold up here, but he doesn't notice while he's running; it's only when he stops that he notices the stiffness setting in and the numbness in his hands and feet.

He passes through a room full of monitors, takes the stairs from 94/8 to 95/14 two at a time, shoulders open the warped hatch at the top. Angie's sitting on a metal crate, wrapped in a dirty fur-lined mantle and fumbling at an oxygen tank with fingers made clumsy by thick gloves. There's a whole line of tanks along the floor behind her. She looks up when Midnighter comes in and gives him a distracted smile, then points at a ladder to a round hatch in the ceiling.

“It's cold,” says Angie. “I'm about to head down, but I was waiting for you. This is all the oxygen we have, so ration it.”

Midnighter nods. There's a tank already fitted with a mask on the floor by the ladder. He picks it up, slings it over one shoulder and climbs up the ladder.

Angie wasn't kidding. The cold hits him like a brick wall. His coat isn't nearly heavy enough, but at least he's protected from the wind everywhere except his mouth. He begins to take a breath – and gets a lungful of searing cold with nothing in it. He fumbles the plastic mask over his face and twists open the valve on the top of the tank before hauling himself over the last ridge between the top of the ladder and the surface of the Carrier.

The ledge is narrow but sturdy. A lower spire has snapped and is leaning against this one, serving as a buttress. The view is panoramic, though there's nothing much worth looking at. It's defensible.

No one's here.

Midnighter feels the shift in the air and looks up. Swift lands first, talons clicking against the metal ledge. She settles her wings, readjusts her oxygen mask and raises a hand to Midnighter, but he isn't looking at her. She brushes past him to step into the hatch, folding her wings tight against her body to fit through.

Apollo touches down lightly, toes first, and his smile is hesitant.

Midnighter's arms are around Apollo before he even seems to move. He yanks off his oxygen mask long enough to press his face into Apollo's neck, smell that he's real, feel the warmth he hasn't felt for over a month. Apollo hugs back, desperate for contact. Heat seeps into him everywhere Apollo's touching him and he thinks he could stay up here forever if he didn't have to ration the air.

Air. He isn't getting any. He reluctantly pulls back to replace the oxygen mask, then returns to the crushing embrace, side of his face pressed against Apollo's.

“Hey,” says Apollo, and Midnighter can hear the sunny grin in his voice.

Midnighter shudders. He's waking up to the horror of the last month even while he's trying to put it behind him. His hands clench into fists against Apollo's back.

“I came as soon as I could,” Apollo says. “When I couldn't find any of you... I don't know. I panicked...”

“Forget it,” Midnighter mutters, pressing even closer, as if there's more distance between them that needs closing. “Forget it, it's over.”

“You did the right thing, letting Swift take me,” says Apollo. “Thank you.” He hesitates, then adds, “Have you heard anything from Jenny?”

Midnighter's grimace is hidden against the shoulder of Apollo's unwashed uniform. He shakes his head as much as he can without lifting his face. His throat is too tight to speak.

“She's really gone,” Apollo says, and his voice is as numb as Midnighter feels.

The first sob tears out of Midnighter, even though Apollo's okay and he should be celebrating that. But right now one fear is still passing, poison from a wound, while another is still alive and thriving. And getting one of his two reasons for living back, but not the other, hurts more than he thought possible.

Apollo's shaking against him, too, and they stay like that for all of fifty seconds. Midnighter's lungs ache with the cold, and an involuntary shiver breaks the spell of the moment. Apollo ups his radiation by a few more degrees, but it can't do much against an altitude that should only be occupied by ozone and airplanes.

“Swift was sure she'd killed you,” Midnighter says at last, muffled by the mask. He manages half a grin. “Didn't stop beating herself up about it.”

“We talked already,” says Apollo. “I told her she was being an idiot. And you're right, it's over... we should just try to forget this whole month. I know I want to.”

Midnighter shakes his head. “Not everything's over. It's not gonna be the same now. You still have to stay up high, don't you?”

Apollo hesitates, then nods. “I've tried... I can stay down low for a little while, but it's bad. The smog kills my absorption rate by eighty, eighty-five percent. Just maintaining at baseline sucks the power right out of me. If I let it all go in one burst, I can stay down for maybe five minutes. If I conserve power, call it thirty, forty minutes.”

Midnighter closes his eyes. “Fuck,” he says.

“And you can't stay up here much longer,” Apollo adds, looking like he'd rather swallow acid than remind either of them. He looks into Midnighter's eyes, thumb brushing along the bottom edge of Midnighter's helmet, where it covers his cheekbone.

Midnighter can't feel his feet at all. His fingers are aching, but they're pressed against Apollo, who's radiating as much heat as he can without edging into the danger zone of giving Midnighter third-degree burns.

He looks at Apollo for a second, then pulls the oxygen mask off, undoes a clasp at the side of his neck and yanks off the helmet. Apollo's hands are on his face instantly, fingers in his hair, the heat off him almost painful against numbed skin. Apollo kisses him before he's gotten his hands untangled from the leather and the plastic tubes from the tank; he gets one hand free, digs his fingers against Apollo's scalp and kisses back fiercely, greedy like he hasn't been since those first five years when the fear and adrenaline were a daily drug.

He kisses Apollo until he almost forgets the cold and how badly he needs to breathe. It's eighteen, twenty seconds before he's shaking so much that Apollo pulls away, dropping his hands to Midnighter's arms and trying desperately to rub warmth into them.

“Go,” says Apollo, half-pushing, half-dragging Midnighter to the hatch. Midnighter shrugs his guiding hands off and kisses him one last time, hard, then bends down to haul the hatch open. He holds the oxygen mask to his face with one hand, swings down onto the ladder. He lingers for just a second more, looking up at Apollo, who smiles and kneels, reaching down to touch Midnighter's shoulder. “It's okay, I'll still be here,” Apollo says. “Not going anywhere.”

“Love you,” Midnighter croaks into his mask.

“I love you, too,” says Apollo. “Get out of here before you kill yourself.”

Midnighter looks away with difficulty, then descends the ladder. He hears the hatch clang shut above him and the slight hiss as air fills the room to equilibrium with the rest of the Carrier.

He reaches the bottom of the ladder and collapses, shivering. A heavy blanket drapes itself over him. He glances up. Li smiles at him and holds out one hand. He takes it and she pulls him to his feet.

She takes the tank from him and stores it while he scrubs a hand through his hair and pulls the helmet back on, numb fingers failing to find the catch until the second try. He can still taste Apollo. He's acutely aware of how little space really separates them: eight feet of ladder and one thin bulkhead. But they're already worlds apart.

One of Angie's radios is on the crate she's vacated. It crackles, so Midnighter picks it up and flicks it on while Li finishes double-checking the two half-used tanks for leaks.

“--ift,” says Angie's tinny voice. “Come in, Swift.”

“It's Midnighter,” he says. “Go ahead.”

“Jack just had a fit. He says there's a situation in Battersea.” Angie sounds harried. “His powers have gone dormant again and he's unconscious, but it's a good sign, right? He's healing.”

“Yeah,” says Midnighter. _Good news all around today. That usually means tomorrow's gonna be a bitch._ “That's great, Angie.”

Swift leans over, talks into the radio over Midnighter's shoulder. “You want me to do a sweep?”

“Nah, I want you to stand around picking your nose. Yes, Swift, head out. And anyone want to ask Apollo if he's charged enough to fly backup?”

Midnighter and Swift glance at each other.

“What?” Angie asks into the silence. “He's still a part of the team. And he said he can stay down for half an hour, that's plenty of time for one recon and maybe some heavy lifting.”

“She's right, you know,” says Swift, eyeing Midnighter.

He bares his teeth in a fierce grin. He's already warming up. “I'll get him,” he says into the radio.

“Great,” says Angie, and the radio cuts off.

Swift flexes her talons and heads for the door. “Wait for me,” Midnighter calls. She turns back, eyebrow raised. “I'm coming too,” he says, and she nods.

Midnighter hauls himself back up the ladder, not bothering with oxygen. He pushes open the hatch and sticks his head out. Apollo's still there, sitting with his arms folded over his knees, looking gloomy. He starts in surprise when Midnighter pops up.

“You charged?” Midnighter asks, ignoring the fresh cut of cold.

“Mostly,” Apollo begins. “What are you –“

“Battersea,” says Midnighter. “Jack felt something go wrong. Swift's doing a sweep, might need backup. Want to torch some bad guys?”

Apollo's already getting to his feet, eyebrows nearly to his hairline. _“Jack felt – ?”_

Midnighter's short of breath. “See you downstairs,” he gasps, then ducks down and lets the hatch bang shut.

He barely waits until he gets his breath and some of the feeling in his face back. Swift's perched impatiently on the bottom step of the stairs down to 94/8.

“There's a better launch point five levels down,” says Swift. “The descent from this high gives me a headache.”

Midnighter pops his knuckles. “Then let's go.”

With Apollo flying point, even though it's only for half an hour, and Jack talking to London again, if only in broken fits, it's almost like the team is getting back on its feet. It's almost like they're healing.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe tomorrow, or next week, or next month, they'll find Jenny. The Doctor might come back. Angie's tech might wake up. Jack might walk again. Midnighter's not on the outs with hope just yet, and he's done sliding down into complacency. What's that line? He's not going to go gentle. He's got rage left to spare. No world with Apollo still in it is lightless, after all.


End file.
